A supplement to exhibitions held at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, this book centers around the apple as an art object and as a case study in biodiver sity under threat. Developed over the course of an ongoing, five-year correspondence between artist Antje Majewski and the Polish conceptual artist Paweł Freisler, the project explores the idea of diversity in all of its possible meanings and manifestations, tying together collaborative and associatively connected works by Majewski and Agnieszka Polska, Freisler, Piotr Życieński, and Jimmie Durham in a museum exhibition dealing with the apple.

The remarkable range of ornaments in Freisler’s collection of carved, dried apples is echoed in the diverse colors and shapes found in Majewski’s paintings of different apple varieties, while her film The Freedom of Apples traces the fruit’s genetic reduction to a handful of commercially profitable varieties, an undertaking that requires making sense of the complex relationships behind global food production in capitalism, genetic technology developments in the agricultural sector and in politics and legislation, but also of dissenting voices in favor of another kind of community economy and the pr eservation of diversity. Freisler and Majewski founded a new tradition of planting apple trees in the city space as a communal activity that brings together diverse groups and individuals. So far, two hundred local-variety apple trees have been planted by tree adopters in Mönchengladbach and Łódź.

A German-language version of this publication is also available:Der Apfel. Eine Einführung. (Immer und immer und immer wieder)ISBN 978-3-95679-207-6, €30.00